The Real Thing RPG is a Powered-by-the-Apocalypse game based loosely on themes from the music of grunge-era rockers, Faith No More. The game focuses on fluid character creation and advancement, player-driven stories, and action-drama narratives, with a 90s-noir aesthetic.
Enjoy The Real Thing as a sandbox game with your own stories, or play through over 60 hours of hard-hitting, gritty, action-drama included in the books.
The Real Thing RPG is a throwback to TTRPGs from the 1990s. It embraces the ambiance of games from that time while adding the techniques and mechanisms common to emergent-style RPGs from today. Players drive the action. Narrators guide the story by providing prompts. It is cooperative and immersive… the perfect system for deep character development and gritty modern fantasy.
The RPG zine market has exploded in recent years, and people have realized that short-form storytelling offers an opportunity for curated, immersive experiences. The Real Thing leverages a variation on the popular and versatile Powered by the Apocalypse gaming system and has been approved to carry that label by the system’s creators. For fans of this system, our game will be a welcome addition to their collections. For those who have not played before, it will be easy to learn, easy to play, and easy to run.
The game is presented in three books. Book 1, The Real Thing, contains everything you need to tell your own short-form stories of modern fantasy. The system focuses on “discovery,” a new tool for creating character backgrounds as characters advance through the story. It also contains about 20 hours of adventure content based loosely on themes from The Real Thing album from Faith No More. It’s a bender of a story!
Book 2, Angel Dust, adds new rules for lengthening and expanding stories. This includes concepts and rules for fleshing out towns and cities, factions, and specific locations that add depth to your world. It also adds about 30 more hours of adventure content, continued directly from the story in The Real Thing.
King for a Day, book 3 of the trilogy, adds new rules for supernatural characters and challenges. The system allows for the modular creation of supernatural entities based on lore from around the globe. The included story adds the final chapters of The Real Thing storyline with nearly 20 more hours of playable content.
Though The Real Thing is heavily derived from the popular Powered-by-the-Apocalypse (pbta) game system, it has some groundbreaking new mechanisms that really make it hum.
Character creation is light and fast. Players start with a “playbook”, of which there are 12 to choose from. These create the skeleton of a character’s concept and basic abilities. From there, as the story progresses, the Narrator and players will flesh out their characters’ backstories (and those of the wider world) as the game progresses. This is achieved through a system called Discovery, which allows characters to “fail forward” on a bad roll result, grabbing the spotlight briefly to describe past events or facts about the setting, all guided by Narrator prompts. It creates a rich, emergent story while advancing the abilities of each character.
The game is meant to be gritty, with a high likelihood of harm befalling the protagonists. This harm takes two primary forms: Stress and Wounds. Stress accumulates over time from a number of sources and can lead to Complications such as temporary mental health issues if not mitigated properly. Wounds are physical harm, and if a character sustains too much of it, they can suffer Injuries, such as broken bones or a concussion. Both Injuries and Complications have long-lasting effects, but can be overcome.
Some characters may eventually become gifted or cursed, gaining some measure of supernatural power. As they do so, they undergo a change that strips away much of their humanity in a sort of “undoing” of the Discovery system. Such advancement leads to the removal of memories and human skills while simultaneously granting amazing powers such as magic, inhuman prowess, arcane abilities, and numerous other options. But beware… overuse of such power can lead to complete degeneration.
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